Queer Places:
Evington House, Newgarden, Co. Carlow, R93 A7P0
Alvarado Court Apartments, 404-B S Alvarado St, Los Angeles, CA 90057
Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90038, USA
William Desmond Taylor (born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner,
26 April 1872 – 1 February 1922) was an
Anglo-Irish-American
director and
actor. A popular figure in the growing
Hollywood motion picture colony of the 1910s and early 1920s, he directed
59
silent films between 1914 and 1922 and acted in 27 between 1913 and 1915.[1]
George James Hopkins was an American set designer, playwright and production designer,
who had a professional and intimate relationship with Taylor. On the morning that Taylor's body was found, Charles Eyton instructed Hopkins to remove a basket of documents from the murder scene, and Hopkins obeyed. Hopkins' unpublished 1981 autobiography, Caught in the Act, was used as a major source for Charles Higham's book on the Taylor murder.
Taylor's murder on 1 February 1922, along with other Hollywood scandals,
such as the
Roscoe Arbuckle trial, led to a frenzy of sensationalist and often
fabricated newspaper reports.[2]
The murder remains an official
cold case.[3]
William Cunningham Deane-Tanner was born into the Anglo-Irish gentry on 26
April 1872, at Evington House, County Carlow, Ireland, one of five children of
a retired British Army officer, Major Kearns Deane-Tanner of the Carlow
Rifles, and his wife, Jane O'Brien. His siblings were Denis Gage Deane-Tanner,
Ellen "Nell" Deane-Tanner Faudel-Phillips, Lizzie "Daisy" Deane-Tanner, and
Oswald Kearns Deane-Tanner.[4]
The Home Rule MP Charles Kearns Deane Tanner was his father's youngest
brother.
From 1885 to 1887 Taylor attended
Marlborough College in England.[5]
In 1890, Taylor left Ireland for a
dude ranch in
Kansas. At
the time, it was a short-lived trend among some of the Anglo-Irish and English
gentry to
send their sons to the United States to become "gentleman
farmers". In Kansas, William became reacquainted with
acting (his first experiences being at school) and eventually moved to New
York.[1]
While in New York, he courted Ethel May Hamilton, an actress who had
appeared in the stage musical
Florodora
under the name Ethel May Harrison. Her father was a broker, and was an
investor in the English antiques store on Fifth Avenue, the Antique Shoppe,
that employed Taylor. The couple married in an
Episcopal ceremony on 7 December 1901, at the
Little Church Around the Corner,[4]
and had a daughter in 1902 or 1903.[6]
Taylor was active socially, belonging to a yacht club, and was known to carry
on affairs with women. The Deane-Tanners were well known in New York society
and members of several clubs. He was known as a ladies' man and a heavy
drinker, possibly depressed, when he abruptly vanished on 23 October 1908, at
the age of 36, deserting his wife and their daughter, Ethel Daisy.[1]
After Taylor's disappearance, friends said he had suffered "mental lapses"
before, and his family thought at first he had wandered off during an episode
of amnesia.
His wife obtained a state decree of divorce in 1912.[7][8]
Little is known of the years immediately following his disappearance. He
traveled through Canada, Alaska, and the northwestern United States, gold
mining and working with various acting troupes. Eventually, he switched from
acting to producing. By the time he arrived in San Francisco around 1912,
William Deane-Tanner had changed his name to William Desmond Taylor;[1]
In San Francisco, some New York acquaintances met him, and provided him with
some money to re-establish himself in Los Angeles.[7]
In Hollywood, Taylor worked as a movie actor starting in 1913, including
four appearances opposite
Margaret "Gibby" Gibson. He directed his first film, The Awakening,
in 1914, as an actor-director. Over the next few years, he directed more than
50 films.
Between 1914 and 1919, Taylor was engaged to actress
Neva
Gerber, whom he had met during the filming of The Awakening. Gerber
later recalled, "He was the soul of honour, a man of personal culture,
education, and refinement. I have never known a finer or better man."[9]
Around 1915, Taylor made contact with a sister-in-law, Ada Brennan
Deane-Tanner, wife of Taylor's younger brother Denis. A former British Army
lieutenant and manager of New York antiques business (separate from Taylor's),
Denis had also abandoned his wife and children, disappearing in 1912.[6]
Ada and her daughters moved to
Monrovia, California, where Ada could be treated at the Pottinger
Sanitorium for
tuberculosis. Ada's sister, Lillian Pomeroy, was married to the
sanitorium's physician in charge, Dr. John L. Pomeroy.[10]
Taylor decided to send Ada a monthly check in the amount of $50.00 to help her
support her children, after her husband's abandonment. This would become public after Taylor's murder,
and the press descended upon the little town of Monrovia.
In 1917, Taylor was named head of the newly formed Motion Picture
Directors' Association, a social club that met at the Hotel Alexandria for
beefsteak dinners and games of pinochle and to "tell each othr how much they
like their pictures."
Towards the end of
World
War I, in July 1918, at the age of 46, Taylor enlisted in the
Canadian Expeditionary Force as a private. After training for four and a
half months at
Fort Edward, Nova Scotia, Taylor sailed from Halifax on a troop transport
carrying 500 Canadian soldiers.[11]
They arrived at
Hounslow Barracks, London on 2 December 1918.[11]
By this time, Taylor's ex-wife and daughter were aware that he was working
in Hollywood. In 1918, while watching the film Captain Alvarez, they
saw Taylor appear on the screen. Ethel responded, "That's your father!" In
response, Ethel Daisy wrote Taylor in care of the studio. In 1921, Taylor
visited his ex-wife and daughter in New York City and made Ethel Daisy his
legal heir.
Taylor was ultimately assigned to the
Royal Army Service Corps of the Expeditionary Forces Canteen Service,
stationed at
Dunkirk, and promoted to the temporary grade of lieutenant on 15 January
1919.[12]
At the end of April 1919, Taylor reached his final billet at Berguet, France,
as Major Taylor, Company D,
Royal Fusiliers.[13]
Upon returning to Los Angeles on 14 May 1919, Taylor was honoured by the
Motion Picture Directors Association with a formal banquet at the
Los Angeles Athletic Club.[13]
After returning from military service, Taylor went on to direct some of the
most popular stars of the era, including
Mary Pickford,
Wallace Reid,
Dustin Farnum and his protégée,
Mary Miles Minter, who starred in the 1919 version of
Anne of Green Gables.
Taylor was romantically involved with several women, but his most sustained
relationship was with
George James Hopkins. In
his memoris, Hopkins wrote that as time went on, the two men became less
secretive. In April 1921, they attended together
Mary Garden's opening in Verdi's
"Othello" at the Philarmonic. While they did not walk in together, they sat
beside each other in the front orchestra, in full view of Cecil B. DeMille,
Jesse Lasky, and many other key industry figures.
Some of Taylor's best work was the result of his personal and professional
collaboration with Hopkins. Historians looking for that elusive "gay
sensibility" in the work of gay directors can perhaps start here, with The
Soul of Youth (1920). Just to make sure they got their details correct,
Hopkins wrote that he and Taylor visited an actual make brothel in Los
Angeles. They hired several attractive teenage boys to appear in the movie. To
further give the picture its appropriate decadence, Hopkins bought up antiques
and odd remnants, discovering several "erotic panels" with paintings of
sailors cavorting with bare-breasted mermaids. Photographed and enlarged, they
made a suitably audacious (and presumably outrageously campy) backdrop for the
whorehouse scenes.
In The Furnace the same year, Hopkins designed a scene right out of Dante:
a writhing, slinky, sadomasochistic Hell, with bodybuilders preening as they
received their eternal torture. The actors were all nude, and only later, with
flames addes as special effects, were the forbidden body parts concealed.
Although it was Wilfred Buckland who was credited as art director, Hopkins was
manager of production, presumably in charge of the details of the scene.
One film that has survived, Nurse Marjorie, starring Mary Miles Minter,
shows just how far Hopkins had come as a set designer, and indeed how far the
art of cinematic set design had progressed. Hopkins built a replica of the
Houses of Parliament that was a wonder to behold. The literal pinnacle of the
Taylor-Hopkins partnership came with The Top of the New York, in which George,
once again Neje, wrote the screenplay and built fifteen-feet-tall replicas of
New York rooftops. It would be Taylor's last film before his death.
At 7:30 am on the morning of Thursday, February 2, 1922,[14]
Taylor's body was found inside his
bungalow
at the Alvarado Court Apartments,[14]
404-B South
Alvarado Street,[15]
in
Westlake, Los Angeles, a trendy and affluent neighborhood. He was wearing the
tan gabardine jacket his lover, George James Hopkins, had helped him pick out. A crowd
gathered inside, and someone identifying himself as a doctor stepped forward,
made a cursory examination of the body, and declared Taylor had died of a
stomach
hemorrhage. The doctor was never seen again; when doubts later arose, the
body was rolled over by forensic investigators revealing that the 49-year-old
film director had been shot at least once in the back with what appeared to
have been a small-caliber pistol, which was not found at the scene. The
bungalows were demolished in the 1960s.
In Taylor's pockets, investigators found a wallet holding $78 in cash
($1,190 today), a silver cigarette case, a Waltham
pocket watch, a
pen knife, and a
locket
bearing a photograph of actress
Mabel Normand.[18]
A two-carat diamond ring was on his finger.[19]
With the evidence of the money and valuables on Taylor's body, robbery
seemingly was not the motive for the killing; however, a large but
undetermined sum of cash that Taylor had shown to his accountant the day
before was missing and apparently never accounted for. After some
investigation, the time of Taylor's death was set at 7:50 pm on the evening of
1 February 1922.[15]
Taylor's funeral took place on February 7, 1922, in
St. Paul's Pro-Cathedral. After an
Episcopal ceremony, Taylor was interred in a mausoleum at
Hollywood Forever Cemetery ("Hollywood Cemetery") on
Santa Monica Boulevard, in
Hollywood.[16]
The inscription on his crypt reads, "In Memory of William C. Deane-Tanner,
Beloved Father of Ethel Deane-Tanner. Died 1 February 1922."[17]
On the morning that Taylor's body was found, Charles Eyton instructed
Hopkins to remove a basket of documents from the murder scene, and Hopkins
obeyed. Hopkins' unpublished 1981 autobiography,
Caught in the Act, was used as a major source for
Charles Higham's book on the Taylor murder.
While being interviewed by the police five days after the director's body
was found,
Mary Miles Minter said that following the murder, a friend, director and
actor
Marshall Neilan, had told her that Taylor had made several highly
"delusional" statements about some of his social acquaintances (including her)
during the weeks before his death. She also said that Neilan thought Taylor
had recently become "insane".[20]
In the midst of a media circus caused by the case, Los Angeles Undersheriff
Eugene Biscailuz warned
Chicago Tribune reporter
Eddie Doherty, "The industry has been hurt. Stars have been ruined.
Stockholders have lost millions of dollars. A lot of people are out of jobs
and incensed enough to take a shot at you."[21]
According to
Robert Giroux, "The studios seemed to be fearful that if certain aspects
of the case were exposed, it would exacerbate their problems."
King
Vidor said of the case in 1968: "Last year I interviewed a Los Angeles
police detective, William Michael Cahill, Sr., now retired, who had been
assigned to the case immediately after the murder. He told me, 'We were doing
all right and then, before a week was out, we got the word to lay off.'"[21]
More than a dozen individuals were eventually named as suspects by both the
press and the police. Newspaper reports at the time were both overwhelmingly
sensationalised and speculative, even fabricated, and the murder was used as
the basis for much subsequent "true crime" fiction. Many inaccuracies were
carried forward by later writers who used articles from the popular press as
their sources. Overall, most accounts have consistently focused on seven
people as suspects and witnesses.
Edward F. Sands had prior convictions for
embezzlement, forgery, and serial
desertion
from the US military. Born in Ohio, he had multiple aliases and spoke with an
affected
cockney accent. He had worked as Taylor's
valet and cook
until seven months before the murder. While Taylor was in Europe the summer
before in 1921, Sands had forged Taylor's name on cheques and wrecked his car.
Later, Sands burgled Taylor's bungalow, leaving footprints on the film
director's bed. Following the murder, Sands was never seen or heard from
again.[22]
Henry Peavey, who replaced Sands as valet, was the person who found
Taylor's body. Newspapers noted that Peavey wore flashy golf costumes, but did
not own any
golf clubs. Three days before Taylor's murder, Peavey had been arrested
for "social vagrancy" and charged with being "lewd and dissolute".[23]
In 1931, Peavey died in a San Francisco asylum where he had been
hospitalized for
syphilis-related
dementia.[25]
Mabel Normand was a popular comedic actress and frequent costar with
Charlie Chaplin and
Roscoe Arbuckle. According to author
Robert Giroux, Taylor was deeply in love with Normand, who had originally
approached him for help in curing her
cocaine
dependency. Based upon Normand's subsequent statements to police
investigators, her repeated relapses were devastating for Taylor. According to
Giroux, Taylor met with federal prosecutors shortly before his death and
offered to assist them in filing charges against Normand's cocaine suppliers.
Giroux expresses a belief that Normand's suppliers learned of this meeting and
hired a
contract killer to assassinate the director. According to Giroux, Normand
suspected the reasons for her lover's murder, but did not know the identity of
the triggerman.[26]
On the night of the murder, Normand claimed to have left Taylor's bungalow
at 7:45 pm in a happy mood, carrying a book he had lent her. She and Taylor
blew kisses to each other as her limousine drove her away. Normand was the
last person known to have seen Taylor alive, and the
Los Angeles Police Department subjected her to a grueling interrogation,
but ruled her out as a suspect.[27]
Most subsequent writers have done the same. However, Normand's career had
already slowed, and her reputation was tarnished by revelations of her
addiction, which was seen as a moral failing. According to
George Hopkins, who sat next to her at Taylor's funeral, Normand wept
inconsolably throughout the ceremony.[28]
Ultimately, Normand continued to make films throughout the 1920s. She died
of
tuberculosis eight years later on 23 February 1930. According to her
friend and confidante Julia Brew, Normand asked her a few days before she
died: "Julia, do you think they'll ever find out who killed Bill Taylor?"[17]
Faith Cole MacLean and her husband, actor
Douglas MacLean, were Taylor's neighbors, and Faith is widely believed to
have seen Taylor's killer. The couple was startled by a loud noise at 8 pm.
MacLean went to and opened her front door and she saw someone emerging from
the front door of Taylor's home who she said was dressed, "like my idea of a
motion picture burglar". She recalled this person paused for a moment before
turning and walking back through the door, as if having forgotten something,
then re-emerged seconds later and flashed a smile at her before running off
and disappearing between the buildings. Mrs. MacLean thought that the loud
noise she had heard was a car
back-fire,
not a gunshot. She also told police interviewers this person looked "funny"
(like movie actors in white-faced makeup) and speculated that it may have been
a woman disguised as a man due to the person's height and build.
Charles Eyton was the general manager of
Paramount Pictures. Several sources
claimed that in the hours following Taylor's murder, Eyton entered Taylor's
bungalow with a group of Paramount employees and removed compromising items,
either before police arrived or with their permission.
Mary Miles Minter was a former
child
star and teen screen idol, whose career had been guided by Taylor. Minter,
who had grown up without a father, was only three years older than the
daughter Taylor had abandoned in New York. Love letters from Minter were found
in Taylor's bungalow. Based upon these, the reporters alleged that a sexual
relationship between the 49-year-old Taylor and 19-year-old Minter had started
when she was 17. Robert Giroux and King Vidor, however, disputed this
allegation. Citing Minter's own statements, both believed that her love for
Taylor was unrequited. Taylor had often declined to see Minter and had
described himself as too old for her. However, facsimiles of Minter's passionate letters to Taylor were printed
in newspapers, forever shattering her screen image as a modest and wholesome
young girl. Minter was vilified in the press. She made four more films for
Paramount, and when the studio failed to renew her contract, she received
offers from many other producers. Never comfortable as an actress, Minter
declined them all. In 1957, she married Brandon O. Hildebrandt, a
Danish-American businessman.[29]
She died in
Santa Monica, California, on 4 August 1984.
Charlotte Shelby was Minter's mother. Like many
stage mothers before and since, she has been described as manipulative and
consumed by wanton greed over her daughter's career. Minter and her mother
were bitterly divided by financial disputes and lawsuits for a time, but they
later reconciled. Shelby's initial statements to police about the murder are
still characterized as evasive and "obviously filled with lies" about both her
daughter's relationship with Taylor and "other matters".[30]
Perhaps the most compelling bit of circumstantial evidence was that Shelby
allegedly owned a rare .38-caliber pistol and some unusual bullets which were
very similar to the kind which had killed Taylor. After this information
became public, she reportedly threw the pistol into a
Louisiana bayou. Shelby knew the Los Angeles district attorney socially and spent years
outside the United States, in an effort to avoid both official inquiries by
his successor and press coverage related to the murder. In 1938, her other
daughter, actress
Margaret Shelby (who was by then suffering from both clinical depression
and alcoholism), openly accused her mother of the murder. Shelby was widely
suspected of the crime and was a favorite suspect of many writers. For
example,
Adela Rogers St. Johns speculated that Shelby was torn by feelings of
maternal protection for her daughter and her own attraction to Taylor. Although (like Edward Sands) Shelby feared being tried for the murder, at
least two Los Angeles County district attorneys publicly declined to prosecute
her.[14][31]
Almost 20 years after the murder, Los Angeles district attorney
Buron
Fitts concluded evidence was insufficient for an indictment of Shelby and
recommended that the remaining evidence and case files be retained on a
permanent basis (all of these materials subsequently disappeared). Shelby died
in 1957. Fitts, in ill health, committed suicide in 1973.
Margaret Gibson was a film actress who had worked with Taylor when he
first came to Hollywood. In 1917, she was indicted, tried, and acquitted on
charges equivalent to prostitution (also with allegations of
opium
dealing), after which she changed her professional name to Patricia Palmer. In
1923, Gibson was arrested and jailed on extortion charges, which were later
dropped. Gibson was 27 years old and in Los Angeles at the time of the murder.
No record of her name was ever mentioned in connection with the investigation.
Soon after the murder, she got work in a number of films produced by
Famous Players-Lasky, Taylor's studio at the time of his death. Shortly
before she died in 1964, Gibson reportedly confessed to murdering Taylor.
Through a combination of poor crime-scene management and apparent
corruption, much physical evidence was immediately lost and the rest vanished
over the years, although copies of a few documents from the police files were
made public in 2007.[32]
Various theories were put forward after the murder and in the years since, and
many books were published, claiming to have identified the murderer, but no
hard evidence was ever uncovered to link the crime to a particular individual.
A spate of newspaper-driven Hollywood scandals during the early 1920s
included Taylor's murder, the
Roscoe Arbuckle trial, the death of
Olive Thomas, the mysterious death of
Thomas H. Ince, and the drug-related deaths of
Wallace Reid,
Barbara La Marr, and
Jeanne Eagels, all of which prompted Hollywood studios to begin writing
contracts with "morality clauses" or "moral
turpitude clauses", allowing the dismissal of contractees who breached
them.[33][34]
The murder appears in
F Scott Fitzgerald's 1940 story 'Pat
Hobby's Christmas Wish'. Hobby discovers a supposed confession to the
murder from a Hollywood producer and tries to use it to blackmail him.
The film Sunset Boulevard (1950), with
William Holden and
Gloria Swanson, featured a fictional, aging silent screen actress named "Norma
Desmond", whose name was taken from Taylor's middle name and Mabel
Normand's last name, as a way to resonate with the widely publicised scandals
of almost 30 years before.[35]
Gore
Vidal's novel Hollywood (1990) features a fictionalised account of the Taylor
murder.[37]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Desmond_Taylor
- Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969,
William J. Mann, 2001